Anti-cuts, public services

Q. The Lib/Tory coalition says that the government just has to make social cuts, in the same way as anyone who has "maxed out" their credit cards needs to cut back. Is that true?

A. No. In the first place, there is nothing impossible about the government continuing with a large budget deficit for a while. Governments can't "run out of money" in the same way that households or businesses can.

The Tories who run the Cabinet of Northants Council County have been condemned — by local Tory MPs and Tory council backbenchers — as the “worst-run local authority in the country”, “not up to the job”. The condemnation came in response to the imposition of a section 114 notice on the council, which means that no new expenditure is permitted, “with the exception of safeguarding vulnerable people and statutory services” (sic).

Dublin Central TD Mary Lou McDonald has been elected unopposed as President of Sinn Féin, replacing Gerry Adams who held the job for almost 35 years. McDonald joined Fianna Fáil in the late 1990s, before switching to Sinn Féin. She was elected as the party’s first MEP in 2004, before gaining a seat in the Dáil in 2011.

The departure of Chris Williamson as a shadow minister has been explained by Williamson and others around the Labour leadership as either a conflict over principle or the removal of a maverick left-winger.

It is true that Williamson has spoken out on other issues outside his brief as Shadow Fire Minister, in his weekly online videos. Most recently he advocated rises in council tax for more expensive homes.

The labour movement should demand that not just Carillion, but all the big public service contractors, Serco, G4S, Capita, should be nationalised with minimum compensation, and their public contracts brought back in-house.

Their workers - including agency staff and formally-self-employed contractors - should be brought into union-negotiated public-sector pay and conditions, and the services should be run under the democratic control of the workers and elected public authorities.

Much has been written about the right-wing press’s wrong-headed coverage of the battle against the Haringey Development Vehicle, with its focus on a supposed “Momentum takeover” of the Labour Party obscuring some of the wider housing issues underneath.

We have a new contender now, however, for most boneheaded analysis, and the odds are on that the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) will win the prize.

“We may well have reached 'peak Momentum'. These are the most favourable political circumstances Labour’s hard left could envisage.

“They feel politically vindicated by the general election result, have a well-funded, well-staffed organisation holding a vast amount of data on Labour members and have reshaped Labour’s membership through successive rounds of mass recruitment.”

In the early 1980s, many Labour councils were committed to defy Tory cuts. Sadly, every single one of these councils backed down in the end. There are many lessons to be learned from that defeat.

Today business rates are set by, and channelled through, central government. In the 1980s, councils set and collected rates levied on local businesses. They had more scope to offset central government cuts through these tax-raising powers. In that context many argued that this tax-raising was progressive and redistributive.

According to Women’s Aid there were over twenty thousand referrals to refuge services in 2015-16. Of these, a quarter were turned down due to lack of space. The actual numbers of people accessing all domestic violence services is much higher. The figures are staggering.